The large range of coins made from earliest times has resulted in organized collecting over a long period. The continual history of coin collecting begins with the Italian Renaissance, and Petrarch was characteristic of his time in forming a classical series. During the 15th and sixteenth centuries many collections were created by princes or nobles, for whom Greco-Roman coins possessed each moral and aesthetic appeal. Among the more famous cabinets were those of Jean, duc de Berry, of the d'Este family, of the emperor Maximilian I, and of Matthias Corvinus. The two last collections became the nuclei, respectively, of the current national collections of Austria and Hungary; later the cabinet of Louis XIV was to serve France equally, simply as that of the Stuarts may have served England but for its dispersal in the Puritan revolution.

In the 17th century numismatic students began to catalog and document existing collections. Italy possessed additional than 350, France and the Low Countries concerning 200 every, and Germany not many fewer. The arrival of scholarly numismatic compilations had important results. Distinction between the genuine and therefore the spurious became surer; analytical syntheses based mostly on detailed catalogs began to show the principles of scientific numismatics; the recording of new material was all the more keenly undertaken; and also the half played by numismatic evidence in historical reconstruction was increasingly understood.

From the eighteenth century onward it absolutely was thus all the additional important to gather on a scale at once wide and discriminating; and whether or not in control of a royal cabinet, like the eminent Joseph Eckhel (1737-98) at Vienna, or the possessor of a splendid private collection, like William Hunter (1718-eighty three) at Glasgow, the 18th-century collectors made a nice contribution. Lesser collectors could additionally advance the science; their numbers were to grow within the nineteenth century with the output of authoritative catalogs (as well as the British Museum series from 1873) and informed handbooks. This growth was reflected in the muse in several European countries of specialist societies accountable for scholarly publications. However the day of the great non-public collection wasn't nevertheless done: superb cupboards were formed within the late 19th century, and those of Richard Lockett, Virgil Complete, and Emily Norweb in the 20th bore comparison with all except the great museum collections. Normally, however, museums have taken over the main task of forming large collections; those of London, Oxford, Cambridge, Glasgow, Paris, Berlin, Vienna, Munich, Boston, and New York City are among the richest.

London emerged as, and still remains, the globe's largest numismatic market (followed by Zurich), serving the interests of public collections and personal collectors in several lands. Inasmuch as these interests are, jointly, directed increasingly toward the systematic elucidation of historical and economic issues, international cooperation has become a lot of important, being exercised through the International Numismatic Commission, itself related to the International Committee for Historical Sciences. However below this apex there spreads out an enormous body of personal collectors in several lands, whose interests might often have been stimulated in childhood by the possibility gift or discovery of a few coins.